One of the points of my continuing series, "What We Do At Home," has been its subset, "What We Don't Do At Home." We're trying, but we're far from achieving a perfectly sustainable lifestyle, even within the bounds of what any two suburbanites can do without moving to the tropics and growing/shooting/foraging for everything we eat.

Our split is no more stark than in our two vehicles: Prius and Rav4. There are several ways to equivocate: "We're in transition. We doubled the mileage of one car when we went from Passat to Prius." "The Rav still runs well, so we can't justify getting rid of it." "Yes, the Rav is an SUV, but it gets better mileage than practically any other SUV." Yes, but it's also an SUV.

I don't want to lose sight of that, not only to limit my holier-than-Hummer tendencies, but because I've always had a low hypocrisy threshold. And I'm not the only one. That word has come up a couple times recently in my Green People series: Paul Eldrenkamp, the Newton conservational-renovation authority, said I should have asked him about it:

What’s a question I should have asked you? “How hypocritical am I?”

And your answer? “Not as hypocritical as I used to be. The trend line there is downward as well.”

In an interview I've conducted but not yet published, Joe Lstiburek, one of the founders of Building Science Corp., raised the concept several times, though he had a more outward focus.

Tom Friedman touches on it too, in his excellent "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," springboarding off a blogger's comment at greenasathistle.com that "'it’s better to be hypocritical than apathetic when it comes to the environment' — as long as you know that's what you're doing, as long as you keep moving in the right direction, and as long as you don't prematurely declare victory."

In many ways, I would suggest that there is no victory, no line we can pass and then exhale, knowing that the problems are solved . Even if there were such a line, it is still somewhere over the rainbow, far far away. But additionally, this isn't a diet, where we just have to tighten up our disciplines for a little while, and then we can go back to piggish ignorance.

No, we have to change directions and then stay on that path. One way we check in on how we're doing is to keep an eye on our hypocrisy quotient.